Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday July 05, 2011 @07:01PM
from the did-anyone-ask-dr.-evil dept.

jfruhlinger writes "The American tech industry is hobbled by a poor education system, misguided spending priorities, and a byzantine patent system. But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D investment. 'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"

...That's all fine and dandy, but I'm pretty sure open distributed projects won't help America's poor education system. It's a start, and it might give way to some progress, but collaborative researching doesn't help Billy Bob Joel learn how to advance technology if they don't know shit about it.

Common misconception. The Earliest writing I'm aware of touting the ideal self-made man was by Aristotle in 350 B.C, In The Nicomachean Ethic [constitution.org]. Give it a read sometime, lots of it is interesting and timeless wisdom.

I'd be willing to bet a sufficiently dedicated historian could find an even older piece espousing that same philosophy.

Where exactly that work mentions "self-made man" or anything close to the American idea of that?

"Self-made man" is an originally unprivileged person who achieved wealth, power and privilege, supposedly entirely as a result of his own efforts as opposed to being born into privilege, accident, or assistance of society or other members' of society. Such idea was considered utterly idiotic over the whole history of mankind, except for brief and limited time and place when was possible to acquire new land by simply laying claim on newly discovered or undeveloped territory. Before that, in agrarian society, social position of any person was entirely based on amount of land the person owns or controls -- and therefore impossible to change unless for a nobleman that already has control over vast amount of land, with land ownership and political power being supposedly divinely protected privileges. After that, it became based on climbing numerous ladders over hierarchies in industrial society -- and therefore requiring either membership in various elites, or going through education system where a person is constantly assisted by others, or usually both.

"Self-made man" was based on a fantastic image of American frontier -- its poster boy would be a person who taken over some uninhabited land (no problem with local nobility already claiming it, or land being so worthless, no one would bother claiming it) and developed it into a successful business (in such a fantastic world, neither education nor pre-established relationships with people in power are necessary for such accomplishment). It was projected onto early industrialists in US (better known as robber barons), and probably at some extent in Europe (where early capitalists, despite their enterprises all being based on inherited wealth, were seen as having too "low" origin for their power and wealth compared to "real" aristocracy).

While some outside US would believe in such nonsense, it is absolutely definitely an American invention to promote and glorify such a thing. Worse yet, outside US people who are described as "self-made" by American standards, would be categorized as "Nouveau riche", a term that has, and always had strong negative connotations.

We're not going to take our education system seriously until we see ourselves as being in a rivalry with other developed countries. With all the bad shit that came out of the Cold War, we knew that the Soviets and Chinese were serious about education so we had to be serious about education.

Today, our leaders have encouraged us to see ourselves in a rivalry with Islam, and they believe the only way to combat the religious fervor of Islam is with religious fervor of our own. That requires us to be anti-intellectual.

Since I was a kid in the late 60's, there has never been a period of such anti-intellectualism in the 'States like there is today. Just in the past two weeks I've heard "conservative" voices in the media talking about how "college isn't for everyone" on one hand, and how we need to be govern by "Christian precepts" on the other.

Even a real conservative like James Madison, a Founder, wanted a national, government-run university. In 1815 he called for such a university before Congress, saying that it would be "a nursery of enlightened preceptors."

Anti-science, anti-commons, anti-intellect, anti-education, anti-information. Those are the loudest messages from today's "leaders". When a presidential candidate (with a degree from a diploma mill) mangles the language and uses a non-existent word, supporters use the same word ("refudiate") in a sense of sympathetic ignorance, as if to say, "Hey, she may be stupid, but she's just like us". Children are schooled at home because the curriculum is seen as insufficiently ignorant. "Professorial" is used as a curse to condemn an educated president. A classical education is seen as an inferior background to having inherited money and made more. Teachers who have middle-class pay and pensions are said to "have it too good". Scientific facts are put on the same level as ideological nonsense, because "there are two sides to every issue". The right to be misinformed is jealously protected. When it is demonstrated that the leading "news" outlet is purposely misinforming their audience, it is worn as a badge of honor, by both the unreliable narrators and the misinformed themselves. People are told it's raining as they're being pissed on, and the sodden say "we needed the rain".

We've got a very bad half-century ahead of us unless the trend changes. And as our best days get further behind us, the collective chip on our shoulder will get bigger and bigger. That means a lot of the rest of the world is in for a very bad half-century, too.

It would be foolish for anyone over the age of majority to expect any "tech resurgence" in the US in their lifetime. We'll be burning witches before that happens.

* First and foremost, they believe that not doing so is a political suicide; in other words, that the majority of the population (or at least, the voting ones) are religious.

* Second, a religious population is easier to manipulate - they are better prepared to accept statements as true without demanding evidence, for one thing. This is something the islamists figured out long ago but it the US politics has been historically moderate, but very used in the recent history, initially by republicans alone, and now by both main parties.

So, yes, religious beliefs are part of the political agenda. But this is being done because of selfish political reasons, not to "counter" the islamists.

At least for now, the only ones that believe that the best way to combat extremist islam with its own weapons are the rednecks taking their kids to a Jesus camp [youtube.com]

He is probably talking about the public ed which I have to say depending on the area can be just okay or downright shite on a shingle. I ended up yanking my two boys out of public and going home school because not only was the public school a *football school* but probably one of the most bigoted places I had the misfortune to step foot in. The final straw was when a teacher decided to bring her bible INTO CLASS and instead on teaching English gave an hour long speech on "idolaters and sodomites" while my two boys, one Catholic and one gay, were in class.

We would have sued but my sister was in the final stage of cancer and frankly there was just too much stress to deal with their bullshit at the same time. So I told them where they could shove their bibles and went home school. Now the oldest is a Sophomore pred med and the youngest is deciding whether to go computer generated artworks or pursue his love of cooking and become a chef.

*-for those not in the USA a football school is where the entire school is based around...surprise...football. In a football school the books can be 20 years old and the computers worse than what you would dumpster dive, but the training gear would make most AA college programs green with envy and the footballers can pretty much do any damned thing they please and walk away from it. I myself didn't have to go to class for my last 4 years as the coach found me reading Asimov in detention on my first day of HS (The other coach said "Anyone not ready to give me 20 laps can get out of my gym"...so I left. I though I would die laughing when the principal put us in study hall/detention and told the coach "you NEVER tell them they can leave EVAR!") and drug me from class to class and got the teachers to sign off on giving me straight As without showing up, and in return I spent the time teaching my own class where I taught footballers how to spell flower and stood so they could pass the minimum skills test and keep playing. I swear everything was spelled phonetically by those guys, like floer for flower and stud for stood. But as long as they got to play the coach was happy and the classes were so dumbed down I was bored to tears anyway in school, so it all worked out just fine.

I ended up yanking my two boys out of public and going home school because not only was the public school a *football school* but probably one of the most bigoted places I had the misfortune to step foot in.

So you taught your child to be intolerant of someone elses views and to run away and hide from people that aren't like you and/or don't think like you.

Take it back from the guy who steals action figures^W^Wdisplay statuettes from other people's cubicles. I had my X-Men all arranged with a battle against Mojo, Magneto, and Apocolypse, and Mojo is clearly missing. He doesn't seem to belong with Neo, Emperor Palpatine, and Winnie the Pooh. %*&$ing Clepto, stealing bees' honey.

We need the OPTION of "pure technology" programs with no filler and no other goals than giving the student customer as much information and training in the field of their choice.

We have that, see trade schools, even community colleges to a degree. Expand these areas, but do not lower the bar on the university system. The point of the university is to produce a more well rounded person who also has those technical skills(*). Believe it or not, some geeks will need to be able to effectively communicate with people in business, the humanities, medicine, science, etc in order to fulfill the computer needs of these groups. They might even need to lead a group of people with diverse backgrounds representing those various fields.

(*) Whether universities are accomplishing this goal is a different conversation.

That is, you want interchangeable cogs as employees, hire them for their knowledge of current skills then fire them when the project is over since they know nothing else because their education sucks.

Why do you think so many foreigners come to university in the US? Because you get a great education here. I don't see any of them spending the time and money to come here only to go to DeVry or ITT tech though. And those tech-only schools are what you imply you want.

We need more schools that provide the European education model, i.e. most people get in, school costs almost nothing, but they slam your ass with theory until half fail out or quit. You'll have all the time in the world for lear

Get our tech mojo back? Errmm, what? Last I checked, tech giants like Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Google, and Facebook --to name a few-- are all American companies staffed mostly with American citizens.

Intel is 30% contract labor and looking to Beijing to outsource that also. It is shell of a company that has lost its way, and it is currently managed by a finance guy (Paul Otelini) as opposed to a technology guy (Gordon More, Andy Grove).
If Intel had mojo, it would invest in its American workforce, instead of the current practice of using 'green badge' contractors and recycling that flesh on a yearly basis.

This is such a tired and stupid argument. Even if the "tech" people aren't in the US (even though they are), what good is tech without good business and management?

Bankrupt. You know, how US companies have been going for the past few decades. Which rises a question: why would anyone look for business experts or managers from the US, when all the former knows is how to raid the company into an empty shell and walk away just before it collapses, and the latter gives inspiration for Dilbert?

If you look a little closer, these are _global_ companies, that were historically founded in the US, mostly employ non-US citizens and often do not even have the major mart of their operations in the US. But I guess that is a bit too much for you.

You telling me that most of Google's research takes place outside the US?

What about microsoft, mostly based in India? Or would one say that Redmond is their center of operations?

What about Intel, can you cite sources showing the majority of their ops outside the US? Everything I could find showed the majority of their operations occuring in the US (or at least more operations in the US than in any other country).

Worse yet for the made-up-stats guy above is that the three companies you just mentioned are not only mostly within the US, they are mostly entirely within three US States (California, Oregon and Washington). Throw some Austin, TX companies in there and this conversation just gets easier.

Care to cite some specifics? Most of those companies have most of their employees in the United States, and most of those employees are US citizens. My citation is that I work for one of them and have worked for two others. Apple, and Microsoft (two I haven't worked for, but have lived in the same town as their HQs) have more employees in their corporate HQ than the rest of their worldwide sites...combined.

Hillsboro, Oregon? Chandler, Arizona? Folsom and Santa Clara, California? Those are the "Major" locations listed by Intel. Yeah, Intel doesn't list any overseas locations, so I'm just going to guess that the argument they outsource everything and have major global headquarters elsewhere and we need to be afraid we are losing our mojo is just a bunch of b.s.

bay area == cheap labor from overseas. I'm watching it before my eyes, as a resident here almost 20 years, now.

if you are in software and a 'white guy', forget about it. take up some other vocation. you will not get paid competitively and you will be let go once your project is over and/or you trained your replacement. use and dispose: that's what americans are good for.

this country has no future in engineering. we are all forced to become managers. god help us..

Manufacturing is not the same as R&D. When someone talks about getting tech mojo back to the US I assume they're not just talking about assembly jobs. Instead they mean technical jobs not cheap labor. Manufacturing is in China because of cheap labor not for their technical superiority.

I often wonder, and I'd like to see an article about that. It seems to me that when some health insurance company wants a web portal because they have to, or a city wants a new payroll system, they call an american consulting company to handle it... who farms out all the actual work to other countries and keeps the 90% difference. They call it "project management", and nobody actually cares if the project ends up being any good.

But when a high profile tech company develops something important that a billion people are going to use, do they really farm much out? If so, what are all those american thinkers doing employed at Google, Facebook, etc? I don't get the impression that those companies are all MBA's.

I have had to work on projects that use outsourced resources and ever single one of them has been a gigantic cluster fuck. The developers have lacked the skill sets needed to build sophisticated applications. I spent so much time answering questions about basic programming that I might as well did it all. The time difference and language barrier also complicate things. Anyway I have noticed that most of good developers from oversees work in the US.

Right, I guess the majority of people who take apprenticeships are doing it wrong. Your average apprentice for the first 3 years makes under the min. wage just about everywhere in north america. When I was working on my mechanics license, I was making $2.25/hr when the min wage was $6.85. My 'base rate of pay' would have been at min. wage after 3 years.

Yeah nothing quite like having to spend 60% of your wages just on tools.

One of the biggest reason - the US is paying price for blind obsession with capitalism.

Money does not count for everything. Some of the cool technologies were group effort, incubated in universities around the country and not by corporates. By branding all altruistic efforts with Communism/socialism, the country has alienated a lot of creative types.

Start by counting Steve Jobs a salesman and not an innovator and that would be a good start.

'That is not your Ferrari, it is the People's Ferrari. Now give me the keys or else!'

And that's hypocrisy on its face.

If its the peoples Ferrari why should you get the keys?

Most families are quite socialist. They often share cars, houses, food. The ones that are employed cover the expenses of the ones that are not. If someone is ill, the others pick up the slack. If grandma gets sick, she comes to live with you... or you bring her care packages and pay her bills...

You're looking at a hierarchy there - a more primitive form of this might be self > family > tribe > nation > race. (> species if you must - humans before other animals, for instance)

It can work up to a (small) tribe level because you "know" everyone in the tribe within a couple of degrees of separation at most, and you can expect reciprocation enforced by the limited degrees of separation. Beyond that, the incentives for reciprocation drops off quite quickly.

Of course, in the communist theory a car is considered personal property, not private property and a person does have the right to exclude others from it. But don't let facts stand in the way of your rants.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

(...)We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

Communism declares the problem to be "private ownership of the means of production" -- a specific form of property that controls others' labor and allows its owner to seize fruits of others' labor. If you really care about owning a nice car, you can have it. However what you can not do under a Communist system is to get a nice car by amassing "money" through stealing others' labor just because you somehow managed to worm your way into "ownership" of a factory where those people work. Contro

'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"

Open and distributed also means 'share this research with everybody outside of the USA'.

How does the tradition of individuality and private R&D investment" = open access and sharing? America was built on people being shameless opportunists who found a niche and quickly exploited it. Everyone for themselves, the defining characteristic of "individualist".

And furthermore, how does "open access and sharing" give you millions of dollars to do research into advanced rare materials property research, or construct testing facilities? At some point, you need a good amount of money to actually progress past the current cutting edge. Sure, there are some simple ingenious ideas from somebody in their garage, but those are milestone events, not the majority of continual tech progress.

Could could you remind me exactly when this country, or for that matter, any other were not xenophobic gits? Hell when was that great fairy tale melting pot supposed to have occurred? Immigrants would come to this country, settle in an immigrant enclave, and then move to other areas of the country with similar immigrants. Welcome to Human Nature 101:Tribalism. There is no melting pot.

Maybe the idea of melting pot had to do with ideas, rather than geography. The colonies and the early United States had some ideas that simply were not allowed to be even talked about elsewhere. In the 1820's, maybe 20 million came in, and in a generation, the kids had bought in to these ideas and were willing to die for them. Now consider last century's european history with immigrants. There *is* a difference. Let us label the difference "melting pot". Alas, it is then one of those words, like "gene

"Hell when was that great fairy tale melting pot supposed to have occurred? Immigrants would come to this country, settle in an immigrant enclave, and then move to other areas of the country with similar immigrants."

That would be the last couple hundred ears or so. My ancestors emigrated roughly late 1700's to roughly 1850. They came from Sweden, Bohemia (part of modern Czech Republic), and Hesse (and other parts of what is now Germany). Germans used to be an underclass in America. Later the Slavic

"Best fucking country" about sums it up. Who in their right mind would like to go to to a country with this type of supremacy complex? Almost like joining the 3rd Reich, they also thought they were the Herrenrasse.

I'm sure I'm not the only one tired of the reflexive nationalism. The benefits of science and open-source technology can be shared by everyone, everywhere, and the more wide these things are shared, the more they grow.

Sure, I'd like to see better technical education in the US, and an environment more friendly to innovation, but I'd like to see that everywhere.

It doesn't seem like we want to get it back. I hear people want things like:

- More pay for less work. Less work is going to lead to progress?- Green tech. Because regular tech never got anyone anywhere.- Coding for a cause. Feel good about going through the motions. Produce nothing of any particular value.- Hacking. I made this cool bot that does XYZ-super-geeky thing. For hacker cred. What does "productivity" mean?- Envy. I want that thing the other guy has, but I don't want to earn it. Can't we j

Where do you think progress comes from? It certainly isn't from huge multinational corporations with entrenched market positions who shoot down any idea that might skewer existing cash cows. It comes from people having enough free time and available capital to develop an idea on their own time that they can start a new company without worrying about the fiscal impact on their previous employer's existing revenue streams or whether they'll still be able to eat in eighteen months if they quit their job to go

I mean, sure, maybe in the OLD days of Slashdot. But the comments are a lot different now than they were then. We've grown. Evolved! I thought we now all agreed that individuality was a bad thing, and that top-down central planning was the way of the future.

When the high tech companies realize that if they keep shipping jobs overseas, or rather "we'll hire three Indian engineers for every one US based engineer", kids entering college will nolonger choose CompSci/Engineering. We saw this after the dotcom bubble, millions of students went into computer related fields (web dev even...) because the jobs were there.

Now that the jobs are being sent somewhere else, the competition is too great. Eventually it'll be too late.

Ah Kos. The bastion of fringe leftwing non-journalism. Go into debt, then try to spend your way out of it, using other people's money. Let me know how that works okie? Even loan sharks eventually break your bones for failure to pay.

The only true path to debt reduction is a long term democratic president with republican's in charge of at least one house.

Under that method CLinton was forced to cut spending, but pushed for not lowering income(taxes). The first thing Bush does in Office is Hey the governments got a surplus let's give it away instead of paying off our credit cards. Which did absolutely nothing for us in long term economics'(I was predicting the housing market crash in 2005/6, I was

It the republicans fault, it's the democrats fault.It's every Americans fault! Including me!Fine we made mistakes, now what? Polarizing each party so they are debating purely on philosophy won't help. It will make the liberals more liberal and the conservatives more conservative.

The US culture has a trait "rugged individualism" which both helps us and hinders us. Socialism will not work in the US because of it. And because of it we need government control to stop us from going to short sighted.

Both sides suck, and are paid off by the same corporate interests, maybe with slightly different flavorings on each end. Partisan support is the most stupid, destructive, and completely asinine mindset you can possibly have at this point in time.

I wont argue with you on that point aside to say that to some extent they have slightly different corporate masters. They need to make it so that financial support for a candidate is limited to a certain amount, and that only people can contribute. They also need to make it an act of treason to accept any type of kickback.

OR, make the representative size so large as to make it financially too costly to try to bribe them all. Limit terms, increase the size of senate 20 fold, increase the size of the house of representative 100 fold.

If the ratio of Representatives to represented is returned to George Washington's 1:40000 ideal, we'd need about 7000 reps.

It'd be tough to continue to bribe half of 7000 people. Returning to state appointment of Senators would probably do more to reduce the hyper-partisianship though. When you don't have to spend half of your time on the job running for election, you can focus on actually doing what your state needs rather than what some party boss thinks the party needs, and there's a whole lot less adv

I always liked what Bill Maher said: "The only difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that the Democrats are bought and paid for by as slightly less frightening group of corporate interests.

Full disclosure: I'm a wild-eyed anarchist-communist. You know, the kind that throw bombs and shoot the president. If you believe the last hundred years of US propaganda. And if you do, I'm not interested in what you think.

Because you'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes;-)

It's a great plan, when you want any economy holding too many US$ to crash and burn.
Historically the US got oil, sold a lot of weapons systems and traded in raw materials cheaply via the impressive US $.
Many parts of the world are now left holding near empty oil wells, export quality tanks/jets, a few very expensive dams/roads/mines and a pile of US paper to show for all their unique export wealth.
What have the US elite got to lose? They can buy up a crashed world for cents in the new $US.
Want an islan

Having seen some of this so-called "higher education" in the US as a guest, I have to say it cannot be the envy of anyone knowing the US system. What I saw was rather pathetic, both on master level and on PhD level. Sure, there are a few good universities, but the rest of the world has them too. And, at least in the systems I know (Germany, Switzerland), the average University, is much, much better than the average in the US.

The ones you see online are typically from the best professors and/or the best schools in the nation. Might not be that representative of your average state university.

Of course, if you can learn on your own and have good self-initiative, the US higher education system does have a lot of flexibility with internships, and buddying up with the research or interesting projects going on at your school, or even just pushing your own learning & exploration in general. It's not great at all for people who ju

- I think I'll go with "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" that most influential sentence written back in 1776 by TJ.

"Pursuit of happiness" is the most dangerous, destructive idea in the history of mankind.

Happiness is a rare feeling that is produced as a response to extraordinary positive experiences. It is not an everyday, normal occurrence. It is definitely not supposed to be "pursued". A person who believes that he can somehow capture "happiness" and be permanently happy as a result of it, will lead miserable life, and will cause trouble, destruction and death to others whom he will see as an obstacle on his path to t